No problem with your response. I did a quick search of the forums and didn't seem to find anything, but as you said, tough to check everything in a reasonable amount of time.
Objectively, the Xcom 3 raids were not really important to the overall game's mission, but I think they stand out because they were so different from every other mission in any other Xcom game. I don't really remember them being that risky for my personnel, even...it was just fun to watch everything burn and gun down under-equipped cultists.
I think the "magic" that makes that mission type so memorable and fun can be brought over to a game like Xenonauts, and actually have a more meaningful purpose to the game. Part of it involves rewarding destruction, and I think part of it (that would be a slight change) is the idea that you won't "win" the scenario...there will be tension built for the player trying to balance more destruction vs ever increasing aliens. It may be as crude as Xcom 2, with a radio message from HQ warning that enemy reinforcements are inbound with a timer, and the timer reset keeps getting shorter, and reinforcement size larger. Eventually, you fall back to where you started (or a new location) and evacuate.
As for mission type/reason...why are the alien bases on earth anyway? I never understood their purpose, so that makes it hard to come up with a reason for a surgical strike. Maybe there are human prisoners in the facility, and rescuing them gives a bonus to the region they were taken from. Maybe larger aerial threats, like terror missions and alien battle ships, start from the base instead of just randomly dropping in from space. They stock up on reapers bred at the base using prisoners before the terror attack. Whatever. Then, if your interceptors are weak, maybe you can attack the facility, hit the alien hanger, and damage the ship and/or it's fueling/arming facilities, delaying its launch.
As mentioned above, actually capturing an entire alien base would be hard, and a base should have unique equipment (compared to regular ships). Maybe instead of blowing everything up, there are just items throughout the facility. You fight through the corridors, trying NOT to blow much up, have your Xenonauts pick random alien artifacts off of table and walls, and flee, opening new research opportunities.
Just random thinking on how to spice up the ground combat a bit. Overall, the mechanics are great, but the missions objectives end up pretty repetitive (kill everything). Part of the fun of tactical combat games is overcoming the occasional limitation or restriction, and something along these lines adds that.